Friday, September 4, 2009

Looking for a few good Boto developers

Hi -

One of the main goals of the boto project is to support all Amazon services and to keep that support current as AWS releases new versions of the services. As the number of services grow, and the pace of development at AWS increases, that becomes a challenge: at some point I will simply be unable to keep up! To meet that challenge, I would like to solicit help from the boto community.

I'm interested in finding people who would be willing to take ownership of specific boto modules (e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, etc.). There are two possible scenarios:

You could take responsibility for an existing boto module. This would mean addressing issues in the module as well as improving the module. In particular, boto 2.0 will be a major upgrade and may involve significant, even incompatible, changes in existing modules. As the owner of a module, you would be responsible for proposing changes, responding to comments, building consensus and ultimately implementing the changes. In practice, I think that a prerequisite for taking ownership of a module would be that you are a heavy user of the module.

You could express interest in developing new boto modules. We have a strong relationship with AWS and are usually briefed on upcoming services prior to their public announcement. Participating in AWS private alphas and betas is a fun experience and gives you direct input into the services and API's. Participating in this way would require you to sign, and more importantly, to honor a very strict confidentiality agreement with AWS. We can help facilitate this process with AWS.

In addition to these two scenarios, I'm also interested in establish a community of core developers and contributors to boto. As I mentioned before, the 2.0 release will be a major release and everything is on the table. I have a lot of ideas involving refactoring of existing code and also support for services beyond AWS. I would love to get more feedback and more ideas from the community around this release.

If you are interested in getting more involved in boto, please contact me directly; mitch.garnaat at gmail dot com.